


La Bonne Nuit

by DarknessAroundUs



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Demigods, F/M, Fluff, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Moral Ambiguity, aka Charles, canon complient shared half sibling, loosely, spoiler in tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:01:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24574987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarknessAroundUs/pseuds/DarknessAroundUs
Summary: A demi-god walks into a bar.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 49
Kudos: 135
Collections: 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees, Riverdale Bingo Winter 2020





	La Bonne Nuit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WinonaL](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinonaL/gifts).



> I finally expanded one of my drabbles from Riverdale Bingo Winter 2020. I changed the start a little and added some more details, so if you read it before and things seem a little different, you are right - they are. 
> 
> This is gifted to WinonaL for her wonderful encouragement of this story and so many others and her general awesome-ness.
> 
> A huge thank you is owed to KittiLee for betaing this, and being such a good friend. The other day my husband turned to me and said "Should I send KittiLee a thank you note for keeping you sane?", for good reason.
> 
> This is my fourth (ooops!) soulmate fic. 
> 
> There's one warning I wasn't sure how to tag here - There's a huge age gap, but because everyone involved is semi-immortal and over a hundred, it doesn't really mean anything. It exists for plot purposes.
> 
> Also it is incrediblely hard to find gods that aren't related and still match up with Fp and Alice so for the sake of this there God named stand ins are in no way related.

A beautiful woman croons Don’t Smoke in Bed into the microphone, there’s a thirty year scotch in his hand, and Jughead couldn’t be more bored if he tried.

His fingers tap against the bartop. The tips of his fingers are a bit like matches, and so it doesn’t surprise him when a flame leaps up. He watches it for a minute before leaning over and blowing it out.

The proprietor of this fine establishment in podunk nowhere U.S.A., is doubling as the bartender tonight. She doesn’t look up from her phone the whole time.

Jughead has discovered that since the invention of cell phones, there’s really little need to use his own distraction magic.

Sweet Pea returns from the bathroom, the man he left with is nowhere to be seen. 

They’re half brothers, Pea and he, but that’s hardly remarkable. Their father is responsible for hundreds of children, most of them still living out their long lives.

Pea’s a good two hundred years younger than Jughead, although after all this time Jughead’s not sure if that accounts for their difference in disposition. Pea is still joyful, if a little malevolent, after all this time. Jughead occasionally will get caught up in a great book, or a movie, or even a moment (the beatnik movement provided an exceptionally good year, but the letdown after diminished a lot of the glow).

Pea has been known to call him a 'downer' or 'Mr. Doom & Gloom'. But even if Jughead can't see the future, he already knows something horrible is going to happen somewhere soon.

There are other differences between Jughead and Pea, as well. The pull of lust is weak and slow on Jughead, for Pea lust is his true north. Jughead’s never seen a single color, the whole world is tonal to him, gradients from black to white.

Pea could see in color as soon as he had sex for the first time, not because the person he slept with was the love of his life, but because sex was the love of his life.

Demigod’s soulmates tended not to be people, which was good because people’s life spans were too damn short, but things, ideas, abstract, or concrete. 

For their half brother Archie, music was his soulmate. For Jughead’s oldest friend Toni, it’s art. 

Jughead’s not shocked that Pea wolf-whistles when someone new enters the room. He is however surprised when he looks up to see who Pea’s whistling at, and feels a pulse move through his body, an earthquake of sorts.

The woman’s tall, gorgeous, and wearing dress slitted up within an inch of reason.

“Holy shit, that’s Betty!” Pea says, and at first Jughead has no clue how Pea knows who this is. 

It’s not like either of them usually spend time at this boondock speakeasy. But they’re both headed to an extended family reunion that neither of them are up to attending sober. It takes a lot to get a demi-god drunk but it’s far from impossible.

“Betty Who” Jughead asks. 

It’s not like in his  500 years on earth he hasn’t met hundreds of Betty’s. Even if he knows this one, he can’t be expected to remember her. Although looking at her now, he can’t imagine ever forgetting her.

Betty’s approaching where they are seated at the bar. Her approach is so smooth it doesn’t seem like walking, more like gliding.

“Cooper. I’ve never met her before but I’ve seen pictures,” Sweet Pea whispers, and Jughead instantly knows who Betty is. She’s a legend in her own right, a demi-god too, but on her maternal side. 

Part of why Betty’s so well known is that Artemis, the most famous virgin who wasn’t actually a virgin, is her mother. Artemis has only three children in all her years. Nothing compared to most god’s.

The other is the rumor of how many badly behaving demigods Betty has managed to eliminate. Bret Weston Wallis, and apparently her own half brother, Charles Cooper. Both awful in different ways. All better off dead in Jughead’s opinion.

“Hello,” Betty says, standing in front of them, a glint in her eye. “Did you get me a drink yet?”

Pea reaches casually behind the bar and pulls out an entire bottle of scotch that’s two years older than the scotch Jughead was previously drinking. Pea commandeers a glass as well, and fills it to the brim before handing it to her.

She takes it from Pea and swallows it down, before turning to Jughead. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“We haven’t,” Jughead says. 

He tries to ignore the earthquake feeling that’s returned. His hands shake, his knees tremble. 

He suddenly wonders why, in all the hundreds of years they’ve both been on this earth, they haven’t met, because for the first time in forever, he isn’t bored. It’s like a dull ache has been relieved.

“My mother’s been hiding you from me,” Betty admits, answering the unspoken question, as if he had said it out loud, and perhaps he had. Jughead feels so separate from his body right now. It’s unsettling and oddly satisfying. He hasn’t felt this alive in years.

“Why would that be?” Jughead asks.

Betty leans in, and asks, “Can I?”, her lips separating for a moment and then smacking together quietly. 

“Yes.” Jughead says. He thinks Pea’s laughing behind him. He couldn’t care less.

Betty presses her lips against his. The whole room shifts into color, her eyes a sparkling green, her hair a color he can’t look away from.

“Holy shit!” he exlaims. “How’d you know?”

“Know what?” Pea asks butting in, his body in both their space.

“That we’re soulmates,” Jughead answers. He never thought he’d use that term to describe a person. Before, if it weren’t for the fact that he couldn’t see in color, he would have said that his soulmate was apathy. He has never felt further from that feeling, with Betty next to him.

“No fucking way,” Pea says. “I get sex and you get Cooper, the world is unfair.”

Jughead knows he’s joking, not about the unfairness of the world, that is obvious, but about Betty. 

Jughead turns back to Betty, “You haven’t answered my question yet. How’d you know we were soulmates?”

Betty laughs. “The same way you were born with fire in your body, I was born knowing everyone's soulmate, my own included.”

“Everyone’s?” Jughead asks. “Who or what is my father’s soulmate?”. 

“You don’t know?”

Jughead shakes his head. Ares and he are barely on speaking terms, and even when they were Ares could best be described as charming but unreliable. He talked a lot about nothing of consequence, and he had a hard time keeping track of the details. He’d long forgotten Jughead’s mother’s name. 

“It’s authority,” Betty says.

It’s a good theory, but it hardly proves that Betty has that ability. Jughead should probably ask her about someone whose soulmate he actually knows the identity of. 

“What about Sweet Pea?” 

“Sex.” Betty rolls her eyes as if it couldn’t be more obvious. 

“What about Pop’s?” Jughead knows this is a tricker one. Everyone knows Pop, but everyone associates him with food. Jughead had himself assumed that Pop’s soulmate was Food till he was at his restaurant on a particularly long dark night of the soul and Pop had set him straight. 

“Generosity.” 

“Damnit.” Not only was Jughead’s soulmate gorgeous, but her ability was one he’d never heard of before. Sweet Pea laughs behind him, then goes to pour Betty another drink.

She sips this one more slowly. Jughead wonders how to go about kissing her again without seeming too forward, but just when he’s about to make his move, Pea says, “So why’d you kill Charles and Brent?”

Betty looks away from them for a second, at the singer on the stage who is now singing a truly mediocre rendition of Girl from Ipanema. 

Jughead can see now that the singer is wearing a gold dress. As he glances around the bar he realizes everything looks a little different than he expected. Less dingy and more charming. The red lending a lushness to the room that was previously unseen. 

Then Betty says, “I’ve never met anyone with bloodlust as a soulmate that wasn’t a killer.”

It’s a chilling statement and a surprise. Jughead had never even thought such things were possible as a soulmate. 

Without even realizing it, he must have taken Betty’s hand because when he glances down he sees that he’s holding it in his own. It’s beautiful in it’s own way. Each nail painted a delicate pink. 

Suddenly Jughead connects the dots he left unconnected earlier and he drops Betty’s hand and says, “You’re 200, or 300, right?” 

He himself turned 516 last year.

“175,” Betty says. Much younger than he thought, but still.

“That’s a long time to not find your soulmate.” Jughead had waited longer but he didn’t know who it was. That clearly wasn’t the problem for Betty. 

“I know. I tried. My mother’s very powerful. She didn’t want me to meet you.”

Jughead remembers now that Betty had mentioned her mother had wanted to meet earlier. But at the time he didn’t know how long Betty had been looking for him. He didn’t understand the circumstances.

Fire blooms in his chest, and Pea throws a cloth napkin at him quickly. He manages to stamp it out, the singe of his shirt and the napkin stink a little, but no one around them notices.

Jughead hasn’t felt this kind of anger in years. The idea that Artemis would keep her daughter from him, feels like an act of war. 

He’d met Artemis once, three hundred years ago, or so, at a family reunion in France. She’d looked resplendent and unapproachable. The only words they’d exchanged were when Artemis asked him to pass the wine.

Jughead tries to think of anything he could have done wrong back then. He hadn’t spilled the wine, in that moment or later. They had only interacted for moments. Artemis had probably not even known his name. Half the people there simply referred to him as Ares son. 

He was a demi-god in a sea of demi-gods, only the gods stood out. There were dozens of Ares sons there that very night. There’s a reason the last name Jones is so common. 

Yet he must have done something that stood out, if this Goddess spent over a hundred years keeping her daughter from her one way to see color, the keeper of the other half of her soul. 

When he thinks about all the years they’ve lost, never mind that they have hundreds of years to go, a thousand even, his blood boils again.

“Simmer down.” Sweet Pea says. “I don’t have any more napkins, and I can’t seem to find anything that’s non-alcoholic to dump on you.”

Jughead can see now that both shoulders are smoking. Never a good sign.

“Why did Artemis keep us apart?” Jughead asks. 

“There was more than one reason. She’s always loved the idea of virginity, if not the practice of it.”

Jughead nods. This much is well known. It makes sense in a way that she’d project the same societal construct on to her daughter. 

“Then there’s the little matter of how much she hated your father for getting her pregnant with Charles.”

Sweet Pea drops his glass of whisky on the floor. It shatters and sloshes so impressively that the proprietor finally looks up from her cell phone, if only to toss him a bar towel.

Sweet Pea swears as he cleans up the liquid. He makes no attempt to deal with the glass. 

When he stands up, soaking bar towel still in hand, he says, “So the takeaway from all this is that you killed a God.”

Jughead had just reached that same realization, but he was glad Sweet Pea had said it out loud.

Betty nods. Jughead’s not sure if he should interpret her expression as smug or nervous. Her cheeks are flushed. 

“Artemis shouldn’t have been that shitty,” Sweet Pea says. “Jughead's not our father.” 

It’s an unfortunate choice of words, and Jughead’s glad when Betty seems to ignore it. 

“It wasn’t even about that in the end really. It was control, more than anything,” Betty says. “She has misdirection spells cast on me, she kept me locked in a tower when I found out.”

There’s so many ways to be a bad parent, Jughead thinks, but this seems like one of the worst.

“Plus, you're not an easy man to find. I know you live in New York, but it’s a big city. I spent five years searching fruitlessly.”

Jughead can see that. There were other demi-gods that were easy to find through a network of whispers and rumours, and even a few that you could look up online. But he’d always kept to his small network of Sweet Pea and Archie, as much as possible. This was his first family reunion since France. 

“How’d you find me?” Jughead asks, taking Betty’s hand in his, this time deliberately. Her skin feels soft against his. A real comfort. It reminds him of being in a warm house on a rainy day with a good book.

“Sweet Pea’s much easier to track down, and I know you two are close.”

“Oh?” Sweet Pea says. “Who ratted me out?”

Betty laughs, “The man you were just in the bathroom with is a friend of mine.”

Jughead can’t help but find it satisfying to see Sweet Pea blush. Now that Jughead can see color, blushes seemed obvious. Before, they were just a guessing game. 

“I’m so glad you found me,” Jughead says, taking Betty’s hand and pressing a kiss softly against the back of it. 

He wants to do so much more than that, and before he can really think it through, his lips are brushing her neck, and then pressing hard against hers. 

It’s not enough, after a moment, for just their lips to touch, and he presses his body against her, the material of her dress, silky to the touch, the heat between them, building.

He cannot ever remember feeling so wonderful before, and yet it still feels like not enough. His hand on her back starts to shift upward, seeking skin. 

The sound of a throat clearing breaks them out of it. The raven haired proprietor is glaring at them. 

Betty presses her hand against Jughead’s chest, and says, “We’re leaving”. She doesn’t bother looking at the proprietor when she says it. Her eyes are only inches away from Jughead, and the green in them sparkles, he wonders if this is what willow leaves in the wind on a sunny day looks like. 

Behind him Sweet Pea groans, “We are supposed to meet Archie here, in ten minutes.”

Under normal circumstances Jughead would have waited it out, but Archie was always late, and besides, he’d ditched Jughead a hundred times for girls that were not even his soulmate. 

“Too bad,” Jughead says, throwing some money on the bar. He’s not sure if it’s excessive or stingy. He can never keep track of what money is really worth these days. It’s not like it matters in the scheme of things.

Betty’s holding his hand as they walk out of La Bonne Nuit through the subpar record shop that hides it. 

“Is Sweet Pea mad?” Betty asks. The question makes sense because he hardly said a word when they left, but Jughead knows that’s not it.

“He’s just shocked. I’m usually the last man standing.”

“Oh,” Betty says with a nod. 

“I’ve never seen the point in hooking up much,” Jughead admits. “You?”

Betty shakes her head, “It’s different when you know who you are supposed to be with.”

He thinks how the last centuries have been so different for her. He was anchorless and uncertain, adrift and bored, not finding satisfaction in the places he looked. She knew where to find that satisfaction, but not how. It must have felt like a never ending goose chase. 

He feels for her now, all the work she did to get to him. He wants to make it clear how much her effort means to him. Although words feel insufficient.

Jughead pulls her in close, kisses her shoulder. “I’m so glad you found me.”

Her blush is just visible in the dim light. He opens the door to the record store, and they walk through together. 

Even though they are now in the garbage strewn parking lot of a strip mall in the middle of a state he’s never cared for, Jughead feels so appreciative of the world around him. The green of the cornfields across the street, the darkest blue of night sky above them.

For the first time, he feels joy. He’d read about it his whole life, pursued it for a hundred years or so before giving up, but only now, standing on the fading white line of a parking spot, does joy fill his body and his soul.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Comments are always appreciated, but if you're not up for them today, that's ok.


End file.
